Flashback: Kamala Flounders for 40 Priceless Seconds Trying to Name a Single Rapper

If you were wondering why Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t taken serious questions from the media in the three weeks since she became de facto Democratic presidential nominee, one need only take a glimpse into the not-too-distant past.

Remember 2020? Or, to be more specific, the election cycle that climaxed that year, which stretched back well into the early months of 2019.

In the first round of debates, Harris dismantled one of her opponents — her future boss, President Joe Biden — by implicitly calling him a racist because of his willingness to work with Dixiecrat dinosaurs on killing school busing bills and then touting it during the campaign as a different era of “civility” in Washington.

This almost certainly got her a place on the ticket, and it catapulted her to frontrunner status. Then came this dismantling of Harris by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who noted that she’d talked rather casually about her marijuana use during college — while, at the same time, she was using her position as prosecutor to put people behind bars for possessing the drug.

Kamala Harris refused to release documents that could free innocent prisoners until court forced her to do so. ~Tulsi Gabbard pic.twitter.com/kYZd8vuWWQ

— Advocacy For Good Governance (@governance_101) August 10, 2024

While Kamala’s campaign would go through some ups and downs in the wake of that, it was pretty much over from that moment forward. Harris would be out before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, her campaign ending in a dumpster fire so severe it made Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like mere fires.

Thankfully, there was the deus ex machina of the running mate nomination to save her from political oblivion. But wait — let’s go back to that pot smoking admission from February of 2019 again. As The New York Times noted at the time, it came during an interview with the syndicated radio program “The Breakfast Club” in which, depending on your point of view, she may have said she enjoyed listening to Snoop Dogg and Tupac while she got stoned.

The problem: Neither one had released a debut album before she graduated from college.

The Times insisted that the fuller context of the interview made this claim misinformation, noting that the hosts “had asked Ms. Harris more generally about her music opinions, a key portion in the exchange that makes it unclear whose question Ms. Harris was responding to.”

OK, then. Fast forward to the NAACP’s virtual convention in September of 2020, where Harris appeared via video conference — remember those face-diaper, Zoom-meeting days? — in an event moderated by CNN’s Angela Rye. Rye asked her who the best rapper alive was.

“Tupac,” Harris responded.

Well, slight issue there, too. In case you don’t follow the hippity hop, Tupac was a great rapper, but was is the critical element here; in addition to not having released any albums before Harris graduated from college, he had also died 24 years before Harris ran for president, shot in an unsolved ambush on his car in Las Vegas after a Mike Tyson heavyweight fight.

“He’s not alive!” an initially incredulous Rye said, before realizing how this likely made Kamala look and correcting herself, somewhat humorously: “He lives on. He lives on.”

“I keep doing that,” Harris said, laughing.

“Listen, West Coast girls think Tupac lives on. I’m with you,” Rye said, before giving her another chance to give another answer of a rapper she likes who has a pulse.

If you need to see 40-odd seconds of a top politician flailing to find a rapper — any sentient rapper — she likes that she can name, well, here you go:

Angela Rye shocked that her ‘Best Rapper Alive’ question stumped Kamala Harris. Harris initially chose Tupac, and Rye had to remind Harris that Tupac died nearly 25 years ago:
Angela Rye: “Best rapper alive?”
Kamala Harris (2020): “Tupac”
Angela Rye: “He’s not alive.”
Kamala… pic.twitter.com/DhXlV5jPzC

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) August 8, 2024

“That was not supposed to be a stumper either!” Rye said. Yeah, well, when you’re daft and trying to pretend you’re down with rap but can only name two or three rappers off the top of your head, this is what you get.

The most we got here was that there were some rappers she liked who “I would not mention right now because they should stay in their lane.”

It’s unclear who those were, but one assumes she might have been talking about Kanye West here, given that it was 2020 and he was getting political in a conservative-ish way at the time.

But when Rye asked her for some of those rappers, she said, “Keep moving, Angela. Keep moving.”

Just so we’re clear, this is still Kamala Harris. She’s not unburdened by the past, she just knows that if she shuts up long enough, the media might keep Kamalamania up for long enough that she can survive one gaffe-filled debate, one or two press conferences where she freezes up like a computer with a busted hard drive, and maybe a question here or there. Heck, she might not even have to formulate any policies.

But make no mistake: This is who the Democrats think is capable of running the country. Joe Biden is 81. That’s why he makes mistakes like this.

What’s her excuse?